A few days ago, director and comedian Kevin Smith was thrown off a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. He’s been speaking out about it, calling it “humiliating” and “the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” Two days ago on Mardi Gras (aka Fat Tuesday), late night comedian Craig Ferguson made fat prejudice the subject of his monologue. It is hilarious.

Do you eat because it’s time to eat, whether you’re hungry or not? A lot of people do, and then feel crappy afterwards.

If the goal is to eat when you’re hungry, does that mean regular meal times are out? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. But figuring out how to make your hunger coincide with meal times is actually a skill. People trying to stop emotional eating probably won’t be able to do this immediately.

If you’re a parent, you’ve heard the debate about whether to feed babies “on demand” (when they cry to be fed – i.e. when they are hungry), or on a schedule (at regular meal times, regardless of whether they are hungry).

A schedule is more convenient for the parent, but infants should be fed on demand until they are old enough to speak and understand the concept of meal times. Before that, if they cry and aren’t fed they just feel like they’re being starved. This can lead to emotional eating issues later in life.

Also, infants can’t regulate their intake to accomodate meal times. The same can be said for an emotional eater in early recovery.

Eating at regular meal times has some advantages. If you work outside the home during the day, you may have preset lunch or dinner hours. If you don’t eat then, you don’t have another chance until you get off work. There is also the social aspect of eating with family and friends. You can’t enjoy dinner with others unless you schedule the meal in advance, and then arrange to be hungry at that time.

But once eating becomes disconnected from hunger, meal times become just an excuse for recreational eating, a habit that no longer serves a function. The reason for scheduling meal times is to free you to do other things at non-meal times. If you’re eating between meals as well as at meals, there is no point to the scheduled meals.

Something to Try…

The best way to break out of this habit is to go back to on-demand eating for a while. Ignore conventional meal times to the extent that your schedule allows, and eat the way infants eat – when you’re hungry. Try this for at least a month, and see how it feels.

Once you get used to eating for hunger, you can slowly work your way back to regular meal times, if this is convenient for you. Note that eating at regular meal times means not eating between meals! With practice, you’ll learn how much you need to eat at each meal to hold you until the next meal. You’ll also find that to be hungry for breakfast, you must stop eating at a certain point in the evening. (This also can help you to sleep better.)

Do you eat at meal times and between meal times, as well? How does it feel to eat “on demand”, independent of conventional meal times?

The end of the year is a time to review and take stock. The news media recounts the major events of the last 12 months, and makes lists of the public figures who have died. And we, as individuals, think about our own lives. What happened to us over the last year? What went right? What went wrong? What can we do to make next year better?

Even after good years there is always a little sadness because the passage of time reminds us we are mortal. So resolutions for the new year inevitably involve renewed commitment to healthy habits: quit smoking, exercise more, lose weight. Unsurprisingly, given that the new year comes after a month of heavy holiday eating, a commitment to lose weight is the most common new year resolution of all.

For most people, the commitment doesn’t last. Good intentions translate into a burst of short-term effort followed by discouragement, self-recrimination, and finally giving up. You stop even trying, for a while, anyway.

It doesn’t have to be like that.

Here are the secrets to turning your new year resolutions into your new reality:

1. Put your efforts in the right direction. Don’t waste time on another diet. Fix the underlying problem – the compulsion to eat when you’re not hungry. If 90% of your eating involves moderate amounts of nutritious food, you will be your normal weight. Everyone knows what this means. You eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full, and eat mainly fresh, unprocessed food. If you know what to do and you’re not doing it, the problem is compulsion, and this is not solved by a diet.
2. Approach the problem with the right attitude. The fix is not going to be quick or easy, and anyone who promises that it will be is lying. Emotional eating is a very difficult problem to fix. If it weren’t, you’d have solved it already. Overeating makes you miserable and you’ve been trying for years to stop. So don’t expect to instantly shed your compulsion, and lose at the rate of a pound a day. It sounds extreme when I put it that way, but people really do weigh themselves every morning and feel despair if another pound isn’t gone!
3. Believe that you can do this, because you can. The solution isn’t quick or easy, but it’s achievable, and not just for others. You can do this. As long as you believe this core truth, you will keep trying until you reach your goal. The only way you can fail is if you stop trying. One common reason for discouragement is the unrealistic expectation of a quick and easy fix. Another is the habit of not believing in yourself – something that the Normal Eating method addresses directly.
4. Have patience; learn to take pride in small steps forward. I can’t tell you how many people have joined the Normal Eating Support Group and expect to be able to eat when hungry and stop when full on the first day – or at least by the end of the first week. It doesn’t work that way! That’s where you get at the end of the process, it’s not where you start. Recovery is a journey. Learn to enjoy each step along the way. Life is about the journey, not the destination.
5. Use every tool available to you, and don’t hesitate to ask for help. Compulsive eating is a hard problem – a very hard problem. One interesting result of the Emotional Eating Test I posted last month was the answer to this question: “I feel like I should be able to solve my weight problem without help.” Three-quarters of both men and women answered “yes” to this question! I’ve observed many times over the years that those who post the most in the Normal Eating Support Group tend to make the fastest progress. This is because they’re willing to ask for help.

If you’re an emotional eater, 2010 probably isn’t the first year you’ve promised yourself to lose weight and get in shape once and for all. But it can be the first year you keep this promise. You can achieve the goal of looking your best, and finally feeling comfortable in your own body.

Something to Try…

Psychologists have done studies comparing high achievers to low achievers, trying to divine the secrets to the high achievers’ success. One consistent difference is that high achievers set goals that are just slightly beyond where they are now. The goals are a stretch, but clearly within reach. Low achievers, in contrast, tend to set stratospheric goals. For example, a high achieving college student might have as a career goal a good paying job in her field of study. For a low achieving student, the goal might be wealth and fame.

Setting achievable goals is the key to success. With that in mind, what are your goals – your resolutions – for the next month, the next 6 months, and the next year? Make three lists, and then imagine yourself doing what it takes to reach your goals. Are your goals realistic? Can you visualize yourself doing what it takes to get there? Are you willing to put in the work? If so, you can turn your resolutions into reality.

Please share your lists and post your thoughts here!

Are you an emotional eater? If so, what are the reasons you eat? Are you mainly soothing negative emotions, or do you eat primary to distract yourself from the real problems in your life? How does being fat affect your view of yourself, and perhaps even serve you?

Take the test and find out! After you’ve completed the test, you’ll get:

• An interpretation of your own answers.
• A summary of how others answered, shown separately for men and women.

Men and women both struggle with emotional eating, but they may eat for different reasons – as the summary stats will reveal. (You may have to come back to check the summary stats. The test was just posted so the counts are still low.)

After you take the test, come back here and post a comment saying what you thought of it. Was it informative? Did the interpretation seem right? Were you surprised at the scores of men versus women?

Today is the day after Halloween and candy leftovers abound. Are you locked in a war with yourself about eating it? Here’s how to take the power out of the candy and put it back in you, where it belongs.

The crucial shift is in your attitude. You must know on a deep level – not just intellectually, but emotionally – that you have the right to eat whatever you want. This is true no matter what your current weight. If you feel your rights are constrained by societal mandates – that others can tell you what you should or shouldn’t eat – you’ll stay stuck in a childlike mindset, either doing as you’re told or rebelling against it. Only people with the right to choose can make choices. You can’t freely choose to forego candy or eat a salad unless you understand you have the right to make either choice.

This understanding – this crucial shift in attitude – is the primary goal in Stage 1 of Normal Eating. Recognizing your right to choose won’t make all cravings go away – there’s more fueling emotional eating than just feelings of deprivation – but it will help. And understanding you have this right forms the foundation for progress in later stages.

Note that simply eating a food does not mean you know you have the right to eat it. Someone in the forum posted this recently:

To me, it seems that the goal of Stage 1 is to understand that you are allowed to eat whatever you want. Since I am struggling with bingeing right now, I think I have the “eat whatever you want” part down pat.

Actually, if you’re bingeing, it’s highly unlikely you have the “eat whatever you want part down pat." Usually people who are bingeing feel wracked with guilt about their eating and filled with self-condemnation. They don’t feel at all like they have the right to be doing what they’re doing. And the self-flagellation that goes along with bingeing tends to perpetuate the cycle.

Stage 1 of Normal Eating is not something you eat your way through, it’s something you think your way through. If you eat something and feel guilty about it, you have not not progressed in Stage 1. What’s important isn’t whether you let yourself eat a particular food, but what you say to yourself about eating it. You may actually eat it or you may not – that’s not what’s important.

The goal of Normal Eating is to stop being at war with yourself, where one part of you is pulling you one way, and another part of you is beating the crap out of yourself for it. The first step in the recovery process is to eliminate the false parent you’re rebelling against – the "shoulds" in your head. There are no "shoulds" when it comes to eating; you have the right to make whatever eating choices you want.

Your Body, Your Life

You can know intellectually that you have this right, yet find it hard to accept emotionally – especially if you’re fat. Our society can make fat people feel ashamed of eating anything at all. From someone else in the forum:

I understand the concept that I have the right to eat what I choose. I get that, and I agree with it. However, I feel guilty about EVERYTHING that I eat. Healthy food, junk food, all of it.
…
I have to live in a world where I am ostracized for how I look.

The solution to this may surprise you: Recognize that you have the right to be fat. It is your body, your life, and no one has the right to tell you what to do with either. This is a core boundary issue.

Now, perhaps you don’t choose to be fat. Perhaps you are fat because you are driven by compulsion and unable to make true choices. You still have the right to be fat! The goal of the Normal Eating program is to free you from compulsion so you can make choices. But one of these choices may be that you prefer eating what you want over being thin. That is a legimate choice for you to make about your life. Or you may not choose to be as large as you are now, but down the road you may decide you prefer to eat cookies and be a size 12 than eat no sweets and be a size 0. That is a legitimate choice, too, and your right. No one else has the right to tell you how much you can weigh. It’s simply none of their business.

There still may be fat bigots who ostracize you – nothing to be done about them. But at least you can stop ostracizing yourself. That will help quite a bit. Most fat people say horrible things to themselves. It’s important to monitor your self-talk and stop doing that. There is only one person whose opinion of you really matters, and that is you. If you don’t feel good about yourself as a fat person, losing weight will not fix this. In fact, it’s the reverse. You must feel good about yourself in order to give yourself the gift of a healthy body.

Some proponents of the non-diet approach say it’s okay to eat whatever you want because there is no such thing as a “fattening food”, that it’s just a matter of how much you eat. This isn’t completely correct. There are fattening foods: Nutrient-empty snacks and desserts loaded with quick-digesting carbs are fattening – not because of their calories, but because of their effect on your hormones (see my post on the real cause of obesity). Granted you won’t gain weight from one bite of a brownie, but that’s not the point.

You have the right to eat whatever you want, regardless of whether the food is fattening, because you have the right to be fat. You have the right to do whatever you want with your own body, without limitation. You even have the right to eat in a way that kills you, though you probably will choose not to do this once you reach Stage 4 and become able to make choices. The main point is this: Your right to choose what you eat is absolute. This is your body and your life.

Something to Try…

If you are feeling plagued by your leftover Halloween candy – or if you’re at war with yourself over eating any other type of food – try this novel approach:

• Constantly tell yourself – every time you even think about eating something – that you have the right to eat whatever you want. This needs to become a refrain in your head that you repeat constantly, to counteract the constant cultural pressure in the other direction.
• Ask yourself this very important question: Do I want to eat this right now – do I truly feel like eating it? The answer might be yes, or it might be no. Either way is fine. What’s important is that you ask yourself the question to reinforce in your mind that it is a choice.
• If you decide to eat it, don’t scarf it down so fast that 10 seconds later it’s like it never happened. That’s guilty eating. If you’re going to eat it, enjoy it, savor it. Eat it mindfully. (And if that’s hard, check out this previous post: 5 Reasons Emotional Eaters Shun Mindfulness.)

After you’ve tried this, please report back! How did it feel to do that? Do you feel your attitudes shifting, on an emotional level? Do you feel angry about societal pressure to take away your right to eat what you want? Did the shift in your thinking cause your eating to change at all?

Last night I went to hear Deepak Chopra talk about his new book, Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul. The book was just released yesterday and we all got copies, so I’ve got it hot off the press. The talk, sponsored by the New York Open Center, was held in the magnificent Riverside Church, which for some reason I’d never been in before. I don’t know how I’ve managed to live in New York City for 30 years without seeing this beautiful church.

I haven’t finished reading the book yet – I only just got it last night – but if it’s anything like Chopra’s talk about the book, then I expect it’s wonderful. His talk was amazing. I particularly noticed one of the last things he said: “Changing one’s diet and lifestyle is a byproduct of shifting consciousness.” I noticed it because I say the same thing in Normal Eating for Normal Weight. When your thinking changes, you become able to change how you eat without fighting with yourself. It just happens as a natural byproduct.

Deepak Chopra Book Launch, Riverside Church, NYC. Taken by someone from the Open Center, standing just behind Chopra. I had taken my own picture - or thought I had - but it disappeared from my camera.

About a year ago, someone in the Normal Eating Support Group posted an interesting message about how neuroscience supports the power of the “pause” – a key tool in the Normal Eating approach. The discussion is still ongoing. From the original post:

Recurring / obsessive thoughts are due to neural pathways that have been established in the brain – actual, measurable, observable processes going on there. But neural pathways are not fixed – they can be changed. Compulsive / addictive thoughts go on in the prefrontal cortex. Brain scans show that the prefrontal cortex also becomes active when one is making decisions for oneself. However it is not active when one simply follows instructions (eg a diet). Nor is the prefrontal cortext used when we act mindlessly on our urges and compulsions (eg binging). So if you have spent a lot of time following instructions (dieting) and / or acting mindlessly on impulses (bingeing) you need to work on creating new prefrontal cortex pathways (I’ve seen the term ‘emotional muscle’ used a bit on this forum, which I assume is referring to the process of creating new neural pathways).

So how do you change these neural pathways? Simply avoiding feeling the urge to binge (by distracting oneself with other activities, trying to ignore it, numbing out in some other way) does NOT work – no changes take place in the neural pathways when you avoid the feeling. You have to allow yourself to experience the feelings and the desire mindfully, and THEN make the choice not to act on your compulsive urge to eat (or to pause). This process of allowing oneself to experience the desire but then making the decision for oneself not to act on it, actually causes changes in the brain to occur. New neural pathways are established. The more you practice this (or exercise your ‘emotional muscle’) the easier it becomes because the neural pathways become more established.

Chopra talked at length about exactly this. Research has demonstrated that thinking changes the structure of your brain – called “neuronal plasticity”. Not only that, he says that for this to occur physiologically, your thinking also must be able to change gene expression. That means that you literally can change yourself and your destiny by how you think.

This reminded me of a NOVA scienceNOW piece on “epigenetics” – how lifestlye and environment can change gene expression. Researchers have found that as identical twins get older, they actually become less identical. Their gene expression changes depending on their diet, lifestyle choices, and perhaps – as Chopra says – the way they think. By the time they reach old age, there are so many differences in gene expression that their DNA hardly looks identical anymore.

Chopra said that as many as 500 different genes can change with diet and lifestyle – and perhaps the way we think – including genes for diseases such as cancer. The upshot is that we have much more control over our destinies than we realize. How we look at ourselves and the world is really everything, and potentially transformative. We can change ourselves and change our destiny by changing how we think.

If you read Normal Eating for Normal Weight, you’ll see that I talk at length about changing unhelpful patterns of thought. This is the key to recovery from emotional eating. Emotional eating is not an eating problem, it’s a thinking problem. As your viewpoint – your “consciousness” – shifts, your diet and lifestyle changes as a natural byproduct. It all starts with your thinking.

Thoughts? Comments? I’d love to hear them.

Editing Note: This post and the previous post originally were one long article.

In my previous post I explained why nutrition information has a role in the non-diet approach – not as a rule, but as information. But with all the contradictory nutrition advice out there, is there really such a thing as “good nutrition”? There is not one single nutrition principle that isn’t contested by someone somewhere. Doesn’t this mean that there are no reliable facts about nutrition, and everything is subject to reversal?

Actually, no, though it can feel that way at times. While many details of nutrition are speculative, some principles are backed by voluminous research. So how do you separate proven facts from tentative theories presented as facts, or outright misinformation?

Identifying True Nutrition Facts

Misinformation runs rampant in nutrition more than any of field of science. There is so much contradictory advice that most people throw up their hands and decide no one knows anything.

But think about it. Is it really possible that we know enough physics to put a man on the Moon, and we know enough human biology to perform successful brain surgery, and yet we don’t know one reliable fact about nutrition – not even something as basic as whether meat is good for us? Does that make sense?

In nutrition, as in all other areas of science, there are some very well-proven facts that are truly beyond dispute, and then there are theories where the evidence is much thinner. There are two big obstacles to separating out the facts from the theories and misinformation:

• A public information campaign starting in the mid 1970s presented certain untested theories as facts – theories since proven beyond a doubt to be wrong. These include the idea that a high carb, low fat diet is best for health, and that saturated fat and cholesterol is bad for the heart, while polyunsaturated vegetable oils are heart-healthy. In fact, the opposite is true – the evidence is overwhelming. Our current obesity epidemic dates to the dissemination of this bad advice. And yet the misinformation persists because the agencies that disseminated it can’t find a face-saving way to admit their error. (See this previous post for details.)
• Most books and articles about nutrition do not differentiate between what’s known for sure – the facts backed by mountains of evidence – versus recent theories with thin support. So when one of these theories is debunked, people feel like they can’t trust any nutrition advice.

I don’t pay much attention to unproven theories from epidemiological studies. These are the iffy so-called “facts” that are constantly getting reversed. A couple years ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story by Gary Taubes on the problems with epidemiological studies, and why advice from these studies is so often found to be wrong. Epidemiological studies follow large groups of people for long periods of time – what drugs they’re taking, what diseases they get, etc. – and make inferences about what caused what. The inferences are no more than hypotheses – an epidemiological study cannot prove causation – but the news media loves the hypotheses and disseminates them as fact. Worse yet, doctors sometimes act on these unproven hypotheses, to the detriment of public health.

Nor do I pay much attention to findings from controlled studies that haven’t been replicated. There are zillions of these, often extremely narrow in scope. If a study hasn’t been replicated, there is a chance that the finding was random – just a chance outcome. Also, the narrowness of most controlled studies makes generalized conclusions highly questionable. The observed effect may be trivial compared to larger effects that were not part of the study. You can’t draw general conclusions from a narrow controlled study without confirmation from other directions.

But not all nutrition advice is based on flimsy evidence. I do pay attention to nutrition principles that have been proven repeatedly in controlled studies, and especially when cross-confirmed by studies in completely different fields. One example is the indisputable danger to health of a high carb, low fat diet. Evidence comes from countless studies in multiple fields, including endocrinology, biological anthropology, and biochemistry (fat metabolism), along with studies of isolated populations still eating traditional diets. Another example of indisputable fact is the kinds of fats that are good for us (not polyunsaturated vegetable oils). Healthy versus unhealthy fats will be the subject of a future blog post.

Reality Check: Did We Evolve Eating It?

A quick and reliable touchstone for determining whether a so-called nutrition fact makes any sense is by reference to the diet humans evolved eating – the Paleolithic diet. The human genus first appeared on Earth about 2.6 million years ago. This was the start of the Paleolithic Era. From that time until just 10,000 years ago – the start of agriculture and the Neolithic era – all humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies.

The theory of evolution says that our bodies adapt to what is on hand. The individuals whose bodies were best able to use the nutrition from the available food lived to reproduce. Thus the food that was available to human beings for the first 2 million years of their existence is the food that the human body is adapted to eat. It defines good nutrition.

People in hunter-gatherer societies may suffer more frequently from accident and contagious disease, but non-infectious disease – heart disease, diabetes, cancer, colitis, multiple sclerosis, asthma, lupus, etc. – is virtually nonexistent. We know this from studying modern hunter-gatherer societies. The obvious culprit is diet – the new foods we’ve started eating that our bodies are not adapted to use. When hunter-gatherer societies switch from traditional diets to Western diets, they suddenly develop all the non-infectious diseases that afflict our society – diseases previously unknown to them.

While it’s impossible to know exactly what Paleolithic people ate, we can make some good guesses. One way we know is the structure of our digestive tracts, which are very similar to that of dogs and other carnivorous animals, and very dissimilar to that of herbivores (animals that eat only plants).

There is other evidence that we evolved as meat eaters. Fossil remains of large animals like wooly mammoths show marks from stone knives. Plus studies of modern hunter-gatherer societies show that most of their calories come from animal food. From the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition:

Our analysis showed that whenever and wherever it was ecologically possible, hunter-gatherers consumed high amounts (45–65% of energy) of animal food. Most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherer societies derived >50% (56–65% of energy) of their subsistence from animal foods, whereas only 14% of these societies derived >50% (56–65% of energy) of their subsistence from gathered plant foods. This high reliance on animal-based foods coupled with the relatively low carbohydrate content of wild plant foods produces universally characteristic macronutrient consumption ratios in which protein is elevated (19–35% of energy) at the expense of carbohydrates (22–40% of energy).

We also know some practical things. Paleolithic humans did not keep animals – they hunted them. You don’t milk animals you hunt. And we know that until the Neolithic era 10,000 years ago, most people over the age of 3-4 (after weaning) did not have the enzyme to digest lactose, the sugar in milk. Many people today still lack this enzyme, and are lactose intolerant.

One reason that anthropologists think that Paleolithic people did not eat grain is because it was virtually impossible to gather before agriculture, when we specially bred wheat so it would stay on the stalk and be easier to harvest. Also, grain is tiny – it’s just too time-consuming to gather this.

Until very recently, it was thought that humans starting cooking their food only 200,000 years ago, and for most of their evolution ate their food raw. A Harvard anthropologist recently debunked this idea in a fascinating book called Catching Fire. He argues that it was actually the discovery of cooking that allowed our brains to grow so large – that cooking made us human. I thought his argument was very convincing, though some don’t believe it. Many people still use the touchstone of “can you eat it raw” to determine whether Paleolithic people ate it. You can’t eat grain raw; cooking is required to remove toxicity. But even if you allow that Paleolithic people cooked, they probably did not eat grain because of the harvesting difficulty.

In short, here’s what we know: Our ancestors ate the meat of animals they hunted – mammals (herbivores), birds, and fish. They ate eggs only rarely (in spring, when they could find them and climb up to reach them). On rare occasion they’d eat honey, but they had to brave bees to get it. The only milk product they ate was mother’s milk for the first few years of life, and never again after they were weaned. They ate the plants they found growing in the wild – mostly the leaves, fruits, and flowers. They probably only ate roots or seeds in winter when they were desperate since these are harder to harvest and may contain anti-nutrients (cause a belly ache). “Seeds” include grain, beans, and tree nuts – all of these are plant seeds of one kind or another. In particular, they ate little or no grain – the seeds of plants in the grass family. Note that corn is a grain – a corn stalk is a giant stalk of grass. Wild corn was originally a small plant; it’s now big due to agricultural breeding.

Paleolithic people ate plenty of red meat containing saturated fat, but relatively little carbohydrate. Carbohydrate can take the form of starch or sugar, and is mainly found in roots and seeds (the storage parts of plants), sweet fruits, and honey. All but roots are seasonal, honey is dangerous to obtain, and many roots and seeds are toxic raw and difficult to harvest. Paleolithic people did not eat refined or processed food of any kind – no white sugar, white flour, white rice, or vegetable oil. You can’t make any of these things with stone-age technology. If a food can’t be made with a stone knife and a sharp stick (and perhaps fire), they didn’t eat it.

When you evaluate nutrition advice, the general principle is this: Advice that moves you away from what we evolved eating is highly suspect and probably wrong. Advice that moves you closer to what we evolved eating makes common sense and is probably right.

In general, be suspicious of what Michael Pollan calls “nutritionism”, advice based on the nutritional breakdown of a food rather than the whole food. Avoid weird foods that require advanced technology to produce, no matter what their health claims. Why? Because we don’t know what we don’t know. We can be sure that the Paleolithic diet defines good nutrition, but we can’t reliably list all the micro- and macronutrients that make it so.

Why Nutrition Matters

Beyond the obvious motivation to live a long and healthy life, nutrition matters for this reason:

Not all compulsive eating is emotional eating.

For people whose bodies are sensitive to the quick-digesting carbs we are not adapted to eat (virtually everyone who is overweight), compulsive eating has a physiological component.

Some people can eat a diet high in white flour and white sugar and suffer no obvious ill effects. Others develop unstable blood sugar, carb cravings, and Metabolic Syndrome (obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes). At some point, people in recovery for emotional eating need to address this or they won’t fully reach their goals.

I’m not saying you can never eat another brownie. Nutrition information is just information – it’s not a rule. Not every eating decision has to be based on nutrition. Please don’t try to follow a 100% Paleolithic diet and then pummel yourself when the very thought of not eating grain or sugar makes you crave it.

Just be aware. Notice how refined carbs affect you – both immediately after eating and a few hours later. You may eventually decide you prefer to eat them less often because of how they make you feel.

Thoughts? Comments? I’d love to hear them.

Editing Note: This post and the next post originally were one long article.

For people who have sworn off weight-loss diets, principles of nutrition can seem like just another set of eating rules to rebel against. The idea behind the non-diet approach is that you can trust your inborn body wisdom to tell you when and what to eat. If that’s true, then why do you need to learn anything? Isn’t this an intuitive, non-thinking approach?

If we were living in the Stone Age we could approach it that way. But we live in a time where the universe of foods to choose from is highly unnatural, so we can’t rely only on our natural inclinations, our body wisdom. At some point, we do need to learn about nutrition.

So how do you incorporate nutrition information so as not to feel like you’re back on a diet?

Making Nutrition Principles Your Own

Once you’re free from the grip of compulsion – Stage 4 of Normal Eating – discussions of nutrition are interesting rather than triggering. The Stage 4 chapter in Normal Eating for Normal Weight is where I address nutrition.

But even before that point, when emotional eating is still a struggle, you should be doing eating experiments. From the chapter on Stage 2:

Be a Scientist, Do Experiments

If you always eat similar foods, you may not be able to tell how a food makes your body feel because you have nothing to compare it with. Try pasta for dinner one night, then chicken with veggies the next night, and then cake for dinner the next. All three will satisfy hunger, but they have very different effects on your body. Notice how much better you feel when you eat foods that nourish. If you don’t try it, you can’t know.

Similarly, if you always eat before you’re really hungry, you can’t know how hunger heightens taste and pleasure. Try waiting to varying degrees of hunger before eating. At what hunger level does food taste the best? Do you notice that if you let yourself get too hungry (below a 2), you will tend to overeat?

To learn what satiation feels like (being “just satisfied” versus overfull), try eating to different levels of fullness and compare how your body feels. Does it take longer before you’re hungry again if you eat more?

See if it’s true that eating breakfast is good for you, even if you’re not hungry when you first get up. If it’s really true that energy is low and thinking impaired when you don’t eat breakfast, wouldn’t you notice that? Try it both ways and see how you feel.

Also, don’t forget thirst. Sometimes when you think you’re hungry, you’re really thirsty. See if you can tell the difference.

Note that you can trust your thirst to tell you when to drink water, just as you can trust your hunger to tell you when to eat. You don’t need drinking rules such as eight glasses of water per day any more than you need eating rules. You can trust your body to tell you what it needs.

Have fun with this; try things. I don’t mean just try junk food, but also try healthy food. Try a range of eating experiences so you can compare how your body reacts.

Eating experiments are a key element of Stage 2 that many people don’t pay enough attention to. It’s through eating experiments that you make nutrition principles your own.

The process is very similar to how a child learns to speak. First she experiments with putting words together – not following any rules, but intuitively figuring out what works. Then when she’s older, she refines her language skills by learning principles of grammar.

If you experiment in Stage 2 with different ways of eating, carefully monitoring how your body feels, the nutrition principles you learn in Stage 4 will feel like confirmation and refinement of what you already know, rather than a sudden diet sprung on you at the end.

Something to Try

To start you on the road to making nutrition information your own, do some eating experiments, letting your own experience be your guide. Make changes slowly and gradually – take it a meal at a time. Notice how you feel after eating different foods, and tweak your diet this way and that to see what feels best.

Pay attention not only to how you feel immediately after eating a food, but also how you feel one to three hours later. If you eat quick digesting carbs without fat or protein – for example, a candy bar or a sleeve of crackers – you will feel a sense of energy and well-being immediately after. Then one to three hours later, the pendulum will swing the other way. You’ll feel tired and anxious, and you’ll want to eat more carbs. If you have a snack high in protein and fat but low in carbs (a hard-boiled egg, a chunk of cheese), your energy will be much more stable, and it will take longer to be hungry again. But don’t take my word for it, try it and see if it’s true.

In my next post I talk about what constitutes good nutrition, and how to tell fact from fiction.

Thoughts? Comments? I’d love to hear them.

I’ve never been especially athletic. I don’t enjoy sports, and I was always the last one to be chosen for teams in gym class. It wasn’t that I was particularly fat or out-of-shape as a child. I was a little chubby, but I was fit from the ballet classes I attended from the age of 5, and I always enjoyed riding my bike. The fact was, given the choice between softball and a novel, the novel won every time. I’m a natural book worm.

One of the things that always bothered me in my struggle with weight loss throughout my teens and twenties was the idea that I had to become an exercise aficionado in order to lose weight. I didn’t want to spend my leisure time participating in sports or sweating in a gym. I value (and enjoy) intellectual accomplishment over athleticism. I’d rather be learning something than running around a track. Did I really have to be a different person to be a normal weight?

I am happy to report that the answer is no.

In my late 20s, I discovered the non-diet approach, also called attuned eating, and I dropped my excess weight without a special exercise program. Since then I’ve learned that studies prove what I experienced first-hand:

• Exercise is good for health, but has very little impact on weight.
• You don’t need extreme amounts of sweaty, arduous exercise to be healthy, and in fact pushing your body hard on a regular basis has some health-related downsides. You need a certain minimum, but as you exercise more, there are diminishing returns and ultimately some disadvantages.

Exercise Doesn’t Cause Weight Loss

Last month, Time magazine ran an article entitled “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin” that caused a bit of an uproar. The author talked about his personal experience of working “like a farm animal” for an hour in the gym – for years – and yet never losing his excess weight. He is not alone in this this.

The article went on to cite numerous studies finding that people naturally compensate for extremely strenuous exercise by (1) moving less for the rest of the day, and (2) eating more. So in the end, you may not burn more calories by exercising, and you very well may eat more than you would otherwise. Very strenuous exercise can actually leave you fatter than you would be with moderate exercise.

Gary Taubes found the same thing in his extensive and thorough review of the weight loss literature, Good Calories, Bad Calories (see my summary of his findings). Taubes notes that the advice to exercise to lose weight is relatively recent. Until the 1960s, investigators routinely stated that the increase in energy expenditure from moderate exercise was insignificant and easily matched by slight changes in diet. Moreover, natural appetite increases compensate for even large energy expenditures from exercise.

The extra muscle you build from exercise won’t help much, either. From the Time magazine article:

According to calculations published in the journal Obesity Research by a Columbia University team in 2001, a pound of muscle burns approximately six calories a day in a resting body, compared with the two calories that a pound of fat burns. Which means that after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 lb. of fat to muscle – a major achievement – you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight. Good luck with that.

This is not to say there is no benefit to exercise. There are many health benefits – improved heart health, improved mood, improved cognitive ability. But weight loss isn’t one of the benefits of exercise.

Moderate Exercise is Best for Health

The other big myth that needs exploding is the type of exercise you need for health. It’s not what you think.

Short bursts of strenuous exercise such as an hour at the gym several times a week is not what makes you healthiest. What works best is what comes naturally – to move a lot as part of your day. Walk or bike rather than drive, take the stairs rather than the elevator, use your arms by carrying parcels home from the store. You don’t need to be sweating and hurting; you just need to be moving regularly.

The kind of exercise we need is the kind of exercise we evolved getting, what our bodies adapted to over the course of evolution. Our paleolithic ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Hunting involves long walks, short bursts of running, and then carrying heavy carcasses home. Gathering also involves a lot of walking and carrying of heavy bundles. Between times, paleolithic people relaxed, ate, and drew pictures on the walls of their caves.

If you enjoy athletic pastimes, that’s fine – do what you enjoy! But intensive exercise is not necessary for health, and puts a lot of strain on the body. Seems like every season on “The Biggest Loser”, someone goes home with a stress fracture or some other exercise-related injury. That’s a risk for anyone exercising at that level.

Speaking of “The Biggest Loser” – don’t believe everything you see on TV. Past participants have said that the weekly weigh-ins cover time periods much longer than a week, and admitted using diuretics and starvation to win. At least some have regained everything they lost – there are no follow-up statistics to say what percent.

A Low-Cost Alternative to Gym Membership

Here’s a good way to boost your daily movement: Buy one of those little step counters, and make a habit of wearing it. Walking is the best exercise, and studies show that people who use pedometers walk more. Get a good quality one – the cheap ones become inaccurate within months. The Omron HJ-112 Digital Pocket Pedometer is especially good. And then try to walk at least 10,000 steps per day. That’s a good benchmark for heart health.

How many minutes a day do you spend walking? Can you commit to walking more? It won’t help you to lose weight, but it will make you healthier and happier.

I just finished reading Gary Taubes’ book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s superbly researched and contains crucially important information, but it’s a hard read – long, dense, meandering, and repetitive. I fear that many people won’t get all the way through it. And while the extensive detail on studies is great, the forest gets a bit lost among all the trees. So here is a summary of the book’s main findings, which start with this revolutionary notion:

Overeating is not the cause of obesity, but rather its consequence – a form of body wisdom caused by dietary fuel being abnormally locked away as fat. The cells of your body don’t have enough usable energy, so you eat more and move less. Sound crazy? There’s actually voluminous research to support this theory.

A Heart-Healthy Diet is High Fat

The book starts with a thorough debunking of the idea that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. I’m not going to repeat all the evidence here (read the book for that), but there is no question that the dietary cause of atherosclerosis is excessive dietary carbohydrate, not excessive saturated fat. In fact, eating saturated fat is protective of your heart.

Study after study shows this is true. But unfortunately, before the evidence became so clear, the government and medical establishment made some premature pronouncements about low-fat diets being good for your heart, and now they can’t find a face-saving way to back off from it.

In addition to the experimental evidence, there is the cultural evidence. The chapter on "Diseases of Civilization" gives example after example of hunter-gatherer cultures that never experienced heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, or the rest of the diseases that plague our society – until they started eating the Western diet dominated by white flour, white sugar, and white rice.

Human breast milk is very high in cholesterol. We evolved as hunter-gatherers eating a high-fat diet composed chiefly of red meat. How in the world could this be bad for us? The new food in our diet – processed and excessive carbohydrate – is the obvious cause of the new diseases. There is a wonderful quote about this from Peter Cleave’s testimony before George McGovern’s Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs:

I don’t hold the cholesterol view for a moment. For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life. If anybody tells me that eating fat was the cause of coronary disease, I should look at them in amazement. But, when it comes to the dreadful sweet things that are served up … that is a very different proposition.

Low-Fat Diets Make You Fat

The gigantic mistake that the government and medical establishment made in advising a low-fat diet also affected the advice to people struggling with obesity and diabetes. Doctors who recommended a high-fat, low-carb diet for weight loss risked censure because of the widespread – and erroneous – notion that this was bad for the heart.

All obesity research results were interpreted – sometimes tortuously – to be compatible with the idea that carbs are good for you. And one entire area of evidence – the biology of fat metabolism – was completely ignored, because there was no way to reconcile this with the bad advice to eat lots of carbs.

When you eat carbohydrates – particularly processed carbohydrates like white flour, white rice, or sugar – your body secretes insulin to remove the sugar from your blood. Insulin is the hormone necessary to store fat into your fat cells, and also inhibits the release of fat from your fat cells. You can’t get fat without insulin, and you can’t lose fat with insulin. Obese people virtually always have chronically elevated insulin levels, a precursor to Type 2 diabetes that makes it almost impossible to lose weight.

The only way you can lose weight on a low-fat, high-carb diet is by restricting calories – a semi-starvation diet. Not only is undereating unbearable – for experimental subjects as well as dieters – people almost always regain weight lost from semi-starvation, usually plus some. Study after study shows this to be true, whether you start out fat or lean.

So why isn’t everyone fat on a Western diet? People differ in their sensitivity to carbs – they differ in the amount of insulin released after eating carbs, and the sensitivity of their fat tissue to insulin. Some people can eat cake for every meal and not gain weight, but others will quickly fatten on a high carb diet. Unfortunately, people who don’t struggle with weight often have little sympathy for those who do because they don’t understand that their bodies are different. They think they’re morally superior.

Obesity is Not Caused by Gluttony and Sloth

The nice way of saying "gluttony and sloth" is "overeating and lack of exercise". But however you say it, the fact remains: The common wisdom is that fat people cause their own problem by committing two of the seven deadly sins. No wonder there is so much fat bias.

The conventional wisdom is that you get fat if you eat more calories than you expend – the positive caloric balance hypothesis. But the fact that semi-starvation diets almost never produce long-term weight loss strongly suggests that positive caloric balance – overeating and lack of exercise – is not the underlying cause of obesity.

The positive caloric balance hypothesis assumes that (1) the source of the calories doesn’t matter – a calorie is a calorie, and (2) energy intake and energy expenditure are independent variables. Neither of these assumptions is true:

• A carb calorie has a very different affect on the body than a fat calorie (see above).
• Energy expenditure is highly dependent on energy intake. Our bodies work hard to maintain a constant body weight. Research shows that if you undereat, your metabolism slows to compensate, and if you overeat, your metabolism speeds up. The idea that you can gain or lose weight over time by altering your intake by 100 calories a day is ridiculous. Your body easily compensates for this small variation (and much larger variations).

Growing children have a positive caloric balance. But the reason they are growing is not because they are eating more calories than they are expending. They are eating more calories than they are expending because they are growing. The cause of their growth is growth hormone, not overeating. The same is true in obesity.

Obesity is a fat storage disorder, not an eating disorder. The body is storing too many of the calories you eat as fat instead of making this dietary energy available to your muscles and organs. On a cellular level, you are experiencing semi-starvation. So you eat more, and you conserve energy by moving less. You don’t get fat because you’re overeating and under-exercising, you overeat and under-exercise because you’re getting fat. Just as vertical growth is driven by hormones, so is the “horizontal growth” of obesity – in this case, insulin. Insulin becomes elevated by a diet too high in carbohydrates.

Have you noticed that people who are fat don’t gain weight continuously? You gain weight and then stay at that weight. This is not because of some “set point” that your body is stuck at. Your body maintains a dynamic equilibrium around usable energy, not fat. One hypothesis is that as fat cells expand, it becomes easier for them to release their fat – just as the pressure inside a blown-up balloon will push out the air. Once enough fat is in the cells that it can be mobilized (burned for fuel), a new equilibrium is reached and you stop gaining. Once fat can be mobilized, you don’t need to eat as much because your cells have fuel.

The more insulin circulating in your blood, the harder it is to mobilize your fat stores and burn fat for energy. The more carbohydrates you eat, the more insulin will be circulating in your blood. For those who are genetically vulnerable, a high carb diet eventually causes insulin levels to become chronically elevated, while muscle cells become increasingly resistant to insulin (unable to use dietary glucose for energy). Eventually, fat cells also become insulin resistant, and diabetes is the result.

The cellular semi-starvation from excessive fat storage may be why obese women have trouble getting pregnant. It’s actually similar to what happens to women who are underweight.

Something to Try

Taubes’ book is quite long and extremely detailed. I’m just highlighting its main conclusions. For the evidence – which is voluminous – read the book. Or try some experiments on your own body.

I wrote in a previous post that there are two main reasons that people become overweight: emotional eating and processed food (which is generally high carb). Processed carbohydrates are an unnatural food that cause our body wisdom cues to go haywire. Even if you vanquish emotional eating entirely, you will tend to overeat processed carbohydrates because they induce cravings.

Processed carbs taste good, but they don’t make your body feel good. They give you a buzz followed by a crash, and then constant cravings. They also can affect mood, making you depressed. If you’ve never gone without carbs for a period of time, you may not even realize you feel this way because of what you eat. If you have nothing to compare it to, you may think it’s just you. This is why food experiments are such an important part of Stage 2 of Normal Eating. You have to experience first-hand how different foods make you feel to internalize the body wisdom. You can’t read this and believe it, you have to feel it.

So in the spirit of experimentation, try reducing your carb intake for a few days or a week and see how you feel. Don’t get black-and-white about it – just see if you can slowly push down your carb intake over time. In particular, try to minimize white flour, white rice, and sweets of all kinds – including honey and artificial sweeteners. If you’re feeling ambitious, try minimizing all grain for a few days – even whole wheat and brown rice. Grain is a Neolithic food, introduced with agriculture. It’s not what we evolved eating, and now it’s the staple of the Western diet.

Why cut out artificial sweeteners? Research has found that artificial sweeteners will cause the body to secrete insulin, same as sugar – sweet is sweet. When I read that, I wondered if some people failed to lose weight on low-carb diets because of overuse of artificial sweeteners. If you try lowering your carbs, don’t go the Atkins route of weird ingredients, using highly processed substitutes for flour and sugar. Just skip the bread and the sweets. Stick with real food, recognizable from nature.

I’ve been trying this myself the last few weeks. I had no problem cutting out grain, but sweets were a sticking point. No sweet taste at all? That was tough. But I was able to taper off it, and then – surprisingly – it didn’t bother me. It’s really true that eating carbs induces carb craving. The physiological reasons are detailed in Taubes’ book. Once you wean off it, you stop craving it. It’s a bit like quitting smoking.

Years ago I tried the Atkins diet and didn’t even last a day because I felt so dizzy and weak. I now realize this is because I wasn’t eating fat. One day last week I again tried eating zero carbs, but this time with lots of bacon and sausage (from the farmer’s market – no nitrates), and I felt fine. Actually, I felt better than fine, to my great surprise. My energy level was high and I didn’t feel hungry at all. And I’ve lost a few pounds since I started experimenting.

People in the forum hate when I talk about nutrition; they say it feels like a diet. But it’s not a diet if it’s just an experiment to see how you feel, and it’s not a diet if you choose to eat a certain way because you feel good eating that way.

An important part of Normal Eating is understanding, on a deep level, that it is your right to eat whatever you want. But with rights come responsibilities, and this other side of the coin is just as important. No one can tell you what to eat, and that means you must take responsibility for your own eating. In the end, nutrition matters.

So what do you think? Are you willing to try lowering your carbs as an experiment? If not, why not? If yes, post your experiences!